Stories of Women in Neuroscience · Stories of WiN

Dr. Theanne Griffith

·1 hr 14 min·4 clips

NAV 1.1 is known as a 'super culprit gene' with well over 3,000 disease-causing mutations.

Megan opens by introducing Dr. Thean Griffith and her work at UC Davis. Griffith is an assistant professor in the Department of Physiology and Membrane Biology and an HHMI Freeman Hrabowski scholar, and the interview also mentions her children's book work, including the Magnificent Makers series. She starts at the beginning. Griffith describes herself as a science kid with a strong pull toward the life sciences, then points to AP biology as the class that made neuroscience feel concrete instead of abstract. That shift matters. Before that class, she knew the nervous system existed, but she had not yet seen it as a field full of questions she could actually chase. The conversation then moves into her research. She talks about work on cold receptors, the biophysical properties that make them hyperexcitable, and how that line of study helped explain what those neurons are doing. A key channel comes up. The discussion names the voltage-gated sodium channel NaV1.1 and links it to the behavior of the cold-sensitive neurons she studied in her postdoctoral work. That opens a bigger question. Megan asks what hyperexcitability means for feeling cold, and Griffith points to a related result from Gary Lewin's lab suggesting that warmth may be encoded not by dedicated warm receptors, but by the silencing of tonically active cool receptors. It's a sharp framing. In that model, ongoing cool input acts like a baseline, and changes away from it help the nervous system detect relative warmth. The interview then turns to the career path. Griffith walks through the stretch between that research and her current faculty role, including the process of looking for positions and the move into a professor's life at UC Davis. The tone stays human. She talks about mornings, says she likes a slow quiet start, and makes room for the steady, ordinary habits that help the rest of the work happen. Books stay in the picture too. By the end, the episode has tied together neuroscience, academia, research identity, and children's authorship without pretending those parts of a career arrive in a neat sequence.

As heard by us

A clear career story that links cold sensing, faculty search, and children's books into one steady arc.

The piece follows Dr. Theanne Griffith from an early pull toward the life sciences to an AP biology class that first opened neuroscience, then into the careful study of cold-sensing neurons and the sodium channel NaV1.1.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Follow how an AP biology spark grows into cold-receptor research, an assistant professorship at UC Davis, and children's books.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Stories of Women in Neuroscience